I don’t have the right words. I am not an academic. I just have a feeling and it makes me angry for multiple reasons.

I am angry because I cannot unsee these things

I am angry because I have to do the work

I am angry because I am going to step on toes

I am angry because the vocabulary I need to access right now either does not exist or has been disempowered by those who benefit the most from my non consensual inhabited state of self.

I was a child still dressed in navy /white checkered skirt of Saint Anthony of Padua. Praying to a babyfaced blonde Jesus with a thorn crowned heart radiating from his chest when something whispered to me that the sky was blue because someone told me it was.

This is something I shook off but it kept coming to me. In dreams, scribbles, conversations. The words rounded themselves out of my mouth, nagged at me, pinched my lips and tortured my tongue until I really stopped to think about it.

The sky is blue because someone told me it was.

If this were true what else did I believe simply because I was told it was true. I was unsettled and unbalanced. I searched for god, I searched for self, I questioned and was often silenced… told I was would understand when I was older.

I am older

All I understand is that I was expected not to understand but to accept. To a certain degree I admit that I was fine with that until last night…

It was the song that did it. Janelle Monae “Queen” I’ve been listening to it on repeat to help choreograph a dance piece and the lines got sticky, evoked an emotional reaction that I was not prepared for.

Will you be electric sheep?

Electric ladies, will you sleep?

Or will you preach?

Will you sleep or will you preach

Will you sleep or will you preach

Will you sleep or will you preach

Will you…

And at 3:07am it woke me from my sleep and all I could say was “Fuck!”

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!!!!!!!!!!!!

See realizing that the sky is not blue was one thing… living the truth of it not being blue is a whole other thing.

I’m in mourning right now actually… I think that is where most of the anger is coming from.

I am mourning the loss of the person I made myself to be

The person I thought I was

to move forward into the unknown

of who I was made to be

A huge part of that is my blackness and the stories it brings with it. Not just mine but those that have walked before me. My ancestors are standing at the threshold and beating upon the door commanding that I let them into my spirituality, my body, my mind, my magic and goddess yes even my bedroom

I’m shifting from nurturer to warrior

I hear the drums

Summoning me to war

I’m answering the call.